Kolyma Tales

An Individual Assignment

That evening the overseer rolled up his measuring-tape and said that Dugaev would get an individual assignment for the next day. The foreman, who had been standing beside them and asking the overseer to credit his work gang with ‘an extra ten cubic meters of earth till the day after tomorrow’, suddenly fell silent and stared at an evening star sparkling over the crest of the hill. Baranov, Dugaev’s ‘partner’, who had been helping the overseer measure the amount of work done, picked up his shovel and began to clean the already cleaned pit.

Dugaev was twenty-three years old, and everything that he saw and heard here amazed more than surprised him.

The work gang gathered for a head count, turned in its tools, and returned to the barracks in uneven convict formation. The difficult day was over. In the cafeteria Dugaev, still standing, drank his bowl of cold, watery barley soup. The day’s bread, issued in the morning, had long since been eaten. Dugaev wanted to smoke and looked around to consider who might give him a butt. Baranov was sitting on the window-sill, sprinkling some home-grown tobacco shreds from his tobacco pouch, which he had turned inside out. When he had carefully gathered them all up, he rolled a thin cigarette and handed it to Dugaev.

‘Go ahead,’ he said, ‘but leave me some.’

Dugaev was surprised, since he and Baranov had never been particularly friendly. Cold, hunger, and sleeplessness rendered any friendship impossible, and Dugaev – despite his youth – understood the falseness of the belief that friendship could be tempered by misery and tragedy. For friendship to be friendship, its foundation had to be laid before living conditions reached that last border beyond which no human emotion was left to a man – only mistrust, rage, and lies. Dugaev remembered well the northern proverb that listed the three commandments of prison life: ‘Don’t believe, don’t fear, don’t ask.’

Greedily Dugaev inhaled the sweet smoke of home-grown tobacco, and his head began to spin.

‘I’m getting weaker,’ he said.

Baranov said nothing.

Dugaev returned to the barracks, lay down, and closed his eyes. He had been sleeping badly of late, because he was hungry all the time. His dreams were particularly tormenting, loaves of bread, steaming greasy soup… Unconsciousness took a long time coming, but he opened his eyes half an hour before it was time to go to work anyway.

When the work gang arrived at its site, the group scattered among the assigned test pits.

‘You wait here,’ the foreman said to Dugaev. ‘The overseer will give you an assignment.’

Dugaev sat down on the ground. He was already exhausted enough to be totally indifferent to any change in his fate.

The first wheelbarrows rattled along the board walkway, and shovels scraped against stone.

‘Come over here,’ the overseer said to Dugaev. ‘This is your place.’ He measured out the cubic area of the test pit and marked it with a piece of quartz.

‘Up to here,’ he said. ‘The carpenter will nail a board to the walkway for your wheelbarrow. Dump everything where everyone else does. Here are your shovel, pick, crowbar, and wheelbarrow. Now get a move on.’

Dugaev obediently began his work.

‘It’s better this way,’ he thought. Now no one could complain that he was not working well. Yesterday’s farmers did not have to know that Dugaev was new to this sort of work, that he had enrolled in the university right after school, and that he had now exchanged his student’s existence for this mine, where it was every man for himself. They did not have to understand that he had been exhausted and hungry for a long time and that he did not know how to steal. The ability to steal was a primary virtue here, whatever it involved, from taking the bread of a fellow-inmate to claiming bonuses of thousands of rubles for fictitious, non-existent accomplishments. No one would be concerned about the fact that Dugaev could not last a sixteen-hour working day.

Dugaev swung his pick, hauled, dumped, and again swung his pick, and again hauled and dumped.

After lunch, the overseer walked up, looked at Dugaev’s progress, and left without saying a word… Dugaev went on swinging his pick and dumping. It was still very far to the quartz marker.

In the evening the overseer reappeared and unwound his tape-measure. He measured the work that Dugaev had done.

‘Twenty-five percent,’ he said and looked at Dugaev. ‘Do you hear me – twenty-five percent!’

‘I hear you,’ Dugaev said. He was surprised at this figure. The work was so hard, the shovel picked up so little stone, and it was so difficult to swing the pick. Twenty-five percent of the work quota seemed an enormous amount to Dugaev. His calves ached, and his arms, shoulders, and head hurt from leaning into the wheelbarrow. The sensation of hunger had long since left him. Dugaev ate, because he saw that others were eating, and something prompted him that he should eat, though he did not want to.

‘Well, I guess that’s that,’ the overseer said as he left. ‘Good luck!’

That evening Dugaev was summoned to the investigator. He answered four questions: first name, surname, crime, sentence. These were the four questions that a prisoner had to answer thirty times a day. Later Dugaev fell asleep. The next day he was again working in the work gang with Baranov, and the following night soldiers took him behind the horse barns along a path that led into the woods. They came to a tall fence topped with barbed wire. The fence nearly blocked off a small ravine, and in the night the prisoners could hear tractors backfiring in the distance. When he realized what was about to happen, Dugaev regretted that he had worked for nothing. There had been no reason for him to exhaust himself on this, his last day.